freeing curr-val before curr

[clibs]

freeing curr-val before curr

[tj]

thanks! that LIST_FREE just frees the node itself which holds the value

[humanshell]

Thanks for getting back to me so fast.

I think I understand. You need the the call to if (self->free) self->free(curr->val); because the value associated with a node (its data) is stored separately in memory? So freeing the node only frees the struct? If you didn't have if (self->free) self->free(curr->val); then you'd have a memory leak?

[tj]

yup that's correct, the general rule is every allocation needs a mirrored free()

[humanshell]

Awesome, very cool.

I've always known that manual memory management almost always becomes a headache. But I'm only now beginning to get the chance to work with C on a level that requires dynamic memory from the heap (malloc/free). I'm starting to see now why garbage collection is so popular. :-)

Because list_node_new() accepts a void* to a val somewhere in memory, it's your library's responsibility to ensure the memory created (no matter who allocated and passed it in) gets properly free()'d when the list is no longer needed.

Thanks again for the assistance.